John, thanks for writing that.
I can see why a hacker might want to play with the idea of identity by
impersonating another person once. The operative word here is "play". But
the current situation is... dumb. The terms "derisive" and "divisive" come
to mind.
Lee
On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 12:49 AM, John Adams <jna at retina.net> wrote:
> From the outside, looking in...
>> I was a founding member of one the earliest US hackerspaces, the l0pht,
> before we knew what the word was. This was when the words Open Source
> didn't exist and all we knew of was the League of Programming Freedom,
> which would later become the Free Software Foundation, thanks to RMS.
>> It was when reverse engineering electronics wasn't much of a crime and
> most of the laws regarding "Cybersecurity" didn't exist yet. We started off
> because our girlfriends and wives (yes, some of us were that old) hated
> having all that technology littering our apartments and we all wanted some
> place to work.
>> Women in our organization like Limor Fried (ladyada) and Window Snyder
> forged new ground for women in technology and rallied against male-driven
> engineering fields to create new opportunities to teach others engineering
> and security, for both men and women (and girls and boys.)
>> If not for our ability to come together and share what we knew, none of us
> would have had Internet access or the chance to learn and work on Unix,
> which back then was extremely difficult to do (we had to cobble together
> Sun Sparcstations and Vax machines from junk). Even Slackware was in it's
> mere nascent phase of development and Linux was very, very unstable. These
> experiences, building these machines, built careers for people.
>> What we did back then was more than likely illegal, and we had to work
> together to get access to technology. Our small group of people went on to
> do great things, from speaking in front of congress, to breaking RSA's
> SecurID, and forming great companies like @stake and VeraCode. All because
> we worked together on shared interests.
>> What I do have to say is that the actions of some of the people on this
> list saddens me, and I am just responding to what I see here on the list.
> It keeps me from becoming an active member of Noisebridge. It keeps me from
> getting on my bicycle, riding to the mission and sharing what I know (and
> learning new things from) all of you because my perception of the actions
> of a few make it sound like a wonderful hackerspace has become overrun with
> drama and madness.
>> It keeps me from donating money and certainly keeps me from helping out.
> You've got a permissive society here, perhaps too permissive to permit
> great things to happen.
>> Cut it out. Convince me I'm wrong. I think all of you are smart enough to
> work through this and to realize the value in the resource that you have
> worked so hard to create and the insanity in allowing this to continue
> along the path you've chosen.
>>> --john
>>>> _______________________________________________
> Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
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